I think it's fair to say there's nothing thermonuclear, shall we say, in the August 6th Presidential Daily Brief released this afternoon by the White House. But Condi Rice's claim that the information contained in it was primarily of an historical nature seems at least to leave out some key points.

(You can read the thing yourself here in a .pdf file.)

The first portion of the document covers past plots and efforts by al Qaida against US interests and within the US itself. Then towards the end of the memo it moves into the present with a few tidbits which do raise some questions.

The second to last item says that in the previous three years or so the FBI had observed "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent wtih preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

The last item says that there were currently 70 FBI field investigations the Bureau considered "Bin Ladin-related" and that the FBI and CIA were following up on "a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."

There's certainly far, far less here than you'd need to do anything specific to counter what was coming. But you can't say there aren't some hints: preparations for hijackings, casing of federal buildings in New York (presumably New York City), a three month old tip saying bin Laden operatives were in the US planning some sort of bombing attacks.

Elsewhere in the memo it reports that bin Laden was intent on retaliating in Washington for the 1998 missile attacks on his camps in Afghanistan.

I agree with Robert Wright who wrote, on the Times OpEd page yesterday that the real scandal is not so much what the administration missed pre-9/11 but that they kept to a clearly outmoded vision of national security as solely a matter of conflicts between states even after 9/11 had shown that viewpoint to be seriously inadequate.

Still, the one issue doesn't invalidate the other.

The next question is what the White House, or the CIA or the FBI or whomever, did to follow up on these very fragmentary leads.

I mentioned a few days ago that a friend of mine who <$NoAd$>spent a career in US military intelligence specializing in counter-terrorism is now in Iraq working as a contractor providing security for companies and NGOs.

I received this update from him this morning ...

The fighting two nights ago was loud and widespread throughout the northern and northwestern parts of Baghdad ... areas such as Yarmouk, Sadr City had almost continuous gunfights and rocket attacks. When we heard US forces using the main gun on M-1 tanks at 1 AM we knew it was serious insurgency at hand. The night is no longer the refuge and domain of the Americans. I have to tell you although the wide open areas of Iraq give a false sense of security. Even though much of this is unseen to most people the situation has gone from bad to really bad to unbelievably bad! Westerners are getting hit everywhere. Security companies escorting CPA, themselves and other Westerners are now on the menu for all the armed resistance groups. There was a report of a massive ambush by one security firm that tried to drive in from Amman. Reports have 25-40 gunmen opening up on them. They lost all of their vehicles and had to be given a mercy lift by a passing Iraqi minivan. Several other firms lost western security personnel killed this week in drive-by ambushes and even a seige by the Sadr Militia. Several NGOs, security firms and military bases were literally under siege for days in Kut, Nasiriyah and Baghdad. The boldness and sophistication of the attacks is staggering and it is clear that every one of the resistance fighters and Islamic militiamen have taken heart at the ease of inflicting damage on the Westerners. The abductions of the Japanese hostages is a sign that we have entered a new phase of bad as abduction requires a permissive environment for the hostage taker.

I refer to this entire mess as the second Intifada of Iraq. The first Intifida was last August in Fallujah when US soldiers killed 15-17 Iraqis and Fallujah fell into revolt. Vehicles are being hit where they are easiest to find and the security firms who are here to protect the Westerners are taking casualties because the US Army and Marines are literally stretched thin throughout the country and quite over their own capacity to stop the violence. The resistance's combat operational center of mass is and will continue moving from known mass resistance organizations (such as uniformed Badr Brigade) to small leaderless or autonomous teams or supporters who are now deciding to do what they please to the first target available. Those targets are easy ... Westerners. Any and all. This burst of energy won't last long though ...

I suspect we will have a cool down period in the next few days or within a week but it will be simply to "re-arm and re-fuel for re-strike and re-venge." A true sustained explosion of violence has yet to be coordinated by the myriad of resistance teams but as the independent or semi-centralized resistance groups form, choose leadership and communicate at the internet cafes, you can be pretty sure the second wave of violence is going to come and it will be equally, if not more, dramatic. This time it won't be men in black uniforms, they have learned that lesson in Najaf ... They will shift to urban terrorism and un-uniformed attacks. God forbid if Sadr is killed or captured ... then we have an entire second front that won't give up until we leave.

General Kimmet is wrong if he thinks that he will destroy the Badr brigade or Sadr Army as a military organization because there isn't really one ... he will disperse them into small, highly armed teams of friends and ... voila! Al Qaeda-Iraq or Hezbollah-Iraq will be borne in numbers we will not be able to control. Since the ICDC [the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps] seem to have run off and joined the opposition in Nasiriyah it may reflect the true loyalties of the new Iraqi army and Police. No one is going to cross their family, tribe or religious community for the Americans.

The correct answer is to back off, leave Sadr alone and start to throw lots of money into jobs projects and utilities for the south before this summer's electricity and gas shortages ... will that work? Probably not. But we have just antagonized the core of the Shiite resistance and putting them to work is better than letting them fight us 24/7. General Sanchez is right about one thing ... this is not Vietnam ... Oh no, its not that easy. I refer you to Israel humiliating defeat in Southern Lebanon by Hezbollah's armed resistance for a reference to our potential future.

More soon.

Baghdad Bob, Baghdad Brooks.

Take a look, you'll see what I mean.

Putting out the fire with gasoline<$NoAd$>.

From the AP ...

The people of Fallujah carried their dead to the city's soccer stadium and buried them under the field on Friday, unable to get to cemeteries because of a U.S. siege of the city.

As the struggle for Fallujah entered a fifth day, hundreds of women, children and the elderly streamed out of the city. Marines ordered Iraqi men of ''military age'' to stay behind, sometimes turning back entire families if they refused to be separated.

''A lot of the women were crying,'' said Lance Cpl. Robert Harriot, 22, of Eldred, N.Y. ''There was one car with two women and a man. I told them that he couldn't leave. They tried to plead with me. But I told them no, so they turned around.''

What does this sound more like to you? Southern Lebanon in the early 1980s or the West Bank in 2002?

Nice choice, isn't it?

Our troops have been placed in an impossible situation by a blundering leadership that laughed off the warning signs and friendly advice for a year until the situation blew up in their face.

Awful. Unforgivable.

Contemporary history? This from the Associated <$NoAd$>Press ...

President Bush's August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al-Qaida was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to several people who have seen the memo.

The so-called presidential daily briefing, or PDB, delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 -- a month before the Sept. 11 attacks -- said there were various reports that Osama bin Laden had wanted to strike inside the United States as early as 1997 and continuing into the spring of 2001, the sources told The Associated Press.

The Post says top White House aides said "they hoped they could soon declassify and publicly release at least some portion of the written briefing."

Department of troubling juxtapositions <$NoAd$>...

At the center of a storm brewing for more than two weeks, Rice on Thursday consistently stressed before the packed hearing room on Capitol Hill that the Bush White House was fully engaged against al-Qaida.

She also repeatedly suggested the administration was hampered because it had been in office for only 233 days before the attacks.

April 9, 2004
Chicago Tribune

U.S. soldiers in Baghdad evacuated police stations and the town hall in Baghdad's Shiite Muslim district of Sadr City after five days of fighting with supporters of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, Agence France-Presse reported.

April 9, 2004
Bloomberg News

On Saturday, Bush and his father were to go fishing at the ranch's bass pond with a crew from the Outdoor Life Network's "Fishing with Roland Martin."

The White House approached the network about coming to film Bush, who is eager to cultivate an image as a sportsman with the millions of voters who hunt and fish. The crew was to bring its own boat for the shoot on the small pond.

April 9, 2004
Associated Press

What will we tell the children?

There are all manner of disputes and atmospherics surrounding Condi Rice's testimony yesterday. The key, however, is the dispute over the FBI tasking and related questions raised by Ben-Veniste, Kerrey and Roemer.

From a Friday Washington Post story on the degenerating situation <$NoAd$>in Iraq ...

This is Bush's 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.

and this ...

Bush spent the morning watching national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's televised testimony to the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, then toured his ranch with Wayne LaPierre Jr., chief executive of the National Rifle Association, and other leaders of hunting groups and gave an interview to Ladies' Home Journal. He is not scheduled to appear in public until Sunday, when he will visit nearby Fort Hood, the home base for seven soldiers recently killed in Baghdad.

Vacation gibes are usually unfair. But with the situation in Iraq so critical, shouldn't the president be at the White House? It's a full-time job, comes with a decent salary.

They've even lost Fineman? It must be dire.

A quick note on Condi ...

I watched a good bit, but not all of the testimony this morning.

My reactions were mixed; and I feel in some respects ill-equipped to judge her performance because a) I go into it with a dim view of her and b) I knew many of her statements to be falsehoods or thorough distortions of what happened.

It seemed a good idea on Rice's and the White House's part to tone down the criticisms of Richard Clarke -- but that leaves some question as to how they became so generous to someone whom a week or more ago they were all but accusing of being a criminal.

On the level of atmospherics, she struck me as surprisingly tense and anxious during her opening statement. And she tried to skate through on many points by resorting to repeated instances of semantic mumbojumbo like the fraudulent distinction between "rolling back" al Qaida and "eliminating" al Qaida, or her equal frail distinction between tactics and strategy.

Department of Faint Hearts and Narrow Escapes. Commentary is such an inherently assertive form of communication that it's a good thing to find ways to have fun at your own expense when possible.

As many of you know, I spend a good bit of time working at a Starbucks near my home in Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. And this morning I was in one of my normal seats, talking on the phone to a colleague, when I noticed a group of police surrounding the building with that yellow 'emergency' tape they use to cordon of areas or for crime scenes or whatever.

So I watched this out of the corner of my eye for a bit. And as they started to seem more intent about it, I got off the phone and went over to the front door where a few employees had congregated and were looking out seeing what was going on.

I asked what was up and was told, in a fairly nonchalant way: "Suspicious package outside, no one can come in or leave."

I didn't like the sound of that. And when I looked over and saw the package about three feet from the side of the building I liked it even less. Cover the war on terror? Yes, but not that close. And in any case I thought to myself, I've seen this miniseries before. And I'd really prefer to leave now in my accustomed unitary form.

So after a few moments of haggling with the Starbuckians (I've got a meeting! I simply must go!), they unlocked the door and I skedaddled out past the yellow tape perimeter and then scrambled home.

A short time later, with a bit, but not all, of my manhood recovered, I ventured back with my camera to see what was going on. It seemed the cops having coffee and donuts handed out among them probably meant that things weren't too far gone.

A bomb expert did various tests on the box and, a short time later, the package-formerly-known-as-suspcious was whisked away never to be heard from again.

In case you haven't seen it, take a look at Peter Bergen's list of nine questions that should be asked of Condi Rice when she appears before the 9/11 Commission. It ran on the Times OpEd page on Sunday.

Think of it as a sort of aspirational playbill for tomorrow's show.

I don't have time to write at length on this as I've got an editor (justifiably) breathing down my neck over a late article draft. But when considering tomorrow's testimony, bear in mind that few people across the ideological spectrum believe that Rice has been an effective National Security Advisor.

People on the (relative) left like Powell's team at State; those on the right prefer Rumsfeld and the neocons at DOD. The Strangelovians go for Cheney at OVP. But across the board people fault her managerial competence.

Every administration has its interagency antagonisms, often between the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. But this one's in a class by itself on pure disorganization and factionalism.

Think how many problems this administration has had which deal with one hand not knowing what the other is doing, contending factions pursuing contrary policies simultaneously. That's what the National Security Advisor is there to ride herd over.

Sometimes if no one is completely happy it means you must be doing something right. Other times, it just means everyone can see you're not doing your job.

Don Rumsfeld today at the Pentagon: "U.S. forces are on the offense. The United States and our partners and free Iraqi forces are taking the battle to the terrorists."

Sigh ... Is it immediately clear to you who this statement is about?

"They have concluded he was so surrounded by sycophants he had no real idea of what was happening in [Iraq]."

[ed. note: Special thanks to TPM reader JML for the tip.]

Ages and ages ago we told you how Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith ran the office charged with doling out Iraqi reconstruction contracts. And we told you how Feith's law partner, Marc Zell -- amazingly contravening the law of averages -- had happened to set up a special lobbying shop to lobby for companies looking for sweet Iraq contracts.

And then, because we didn't want to leave out any details, we noted that Zell had opened that new operation with Salem Chalabi. And, yes, Salem is Ahmed's nephew.

Now it turns out that in addition to his entrepreneurial activities, Salem is also in charge of setting up the Iraqi war crimes tribunals, which will eventually try Saddam Hussein.

All of which should reassure you that as messy as things may be at the moment, we're at least freeing this sad land from corrupt dynasticism and clan rule.

Several readers were kind enough to tell me <$NoAd$> that on his radio show today Al Franken mentioned TPM. That put me in the mind of this brush with greatness I had a little earlier in my career, which I recounted in a reporter's notebook item I wrote while on assignment for Salon covering the impeachment of President Clinton in January 1999. It was my first time in Washington as a reporter ...

Maybe the funniest impeachment moment came from comedian Al Franken, who was attending the trial with one of the prized yellow impeachment tickets as a guest of some senator -- he wouldn't say which one. After a few minutes of conversation, Franken and I and a few others were shooed out of the hallway by a Capitol police officer, and we took the elevator back up to the Senate gallery. Before I knew it, Franken and I were sitting together in one of the rooms where senators give press conferences.

Sen. Phil Gramm had just bounded into the room to do a little damage control about Sen. Robert Byrd's proposed motion to dismiss. Apparently one of the first rules of the Senate is that no one can ever criticize Bob Byrd about anything, and Gramm did his best to comply. He told us he'd just spoken to Trent Lott, and he made a strained argument about how it would be wrong to cut the trial short, even if it was clear the House didn't have much of a case. Franken raised his hand and asked Gramm whether he would have voted for the articles of impeachment if he were in the House, knowing what he now knew. Gramm seemed to have no clue who Franken was and proceeded to ignore the question and pipe on about justice being a process, not a verdict.

Franken and I chuckled about Gramm's refusal to answer the question, and suddenly two spindly arms reached across me and grabbed Franken and started to pull him out of his chair. It was a woman from the Senate press office, barking, "You have to leave. You're not press." Franken pointed to me and said, "But I'm with someone from the press" as he was being rushed out of the room. But he stayed in character through the whole thing, laughing as he got tossed out. That really drove the woman crazy. She mustered up her schoolmarm best and scolded him: "It's not funny!"

I rushed out of the press room after Franken got the boot. But by the time I got out into the hall, he'd already slipped back into the Senate gallery -- where celebrities, but not the press, are allowed to roam free.

Those were the days.

This short piece on the BBC website is the first I've seen to suggest a small hint of how this situation in Iraq might be walked back. Will alone solves nothing. With will and guile, there's at least a chance.

Bag the Clausewitz and try the Liddell Hart.

Wow, that is a good line, and a very true one too. Courtesy of Atrios, comes this line from Harold Meyerson's column today in the Post ...

The only unequivocally good policy option before the American people is to dump the president who got us into this mess, who had no trouble sending our young people to Iraq but who cannot steel himself to face the Sept. 11 commission alone.

We have backed ourselves into a very narrow <$Ad$>and very bleak set of options here. What's astonishing is how blindly the White House seems to have stumbled into it.

I don't want to get into a silly conversation about who's 'responsible' for what's happening in the South or who 'caused' it in some deep sense. But we do seem to have triggered it -- by shutting down Sadr's newspaper and arresting his deputy.

One might argue that that was a proper strategy. Sometimes a looming crisis needs to be brought to a head. But if that's so, we seem to have done little to prepare for the reaction. Where's the White House's strategy? Where is it now, three days later?

All we seem to be hearing are hollow assertions of a vacant will.

From the White House's advocates we hear logic puzzles about appeasement in which the fall-out from the president's screw ups become the prime argument for continuing to support them.

At the critical moment the president has the toxic mix of the bulldog will of a Winston Churchill and the strategic insights and imagination of a Neville Chamberlain.

He has no plan. And will without policy just equals death.

The gap between the reality in Iraq and the White House's Potemkin village version of it is closing rapidly, like an upper and lower jaw about to shut tight. And the White House's penchant for denial is being squeezed between the two.

Oh well ...

When Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-Tex.) took charge <$NoAd$>of an independent political fund called American Dream PAC in 1999, he made clear that its mission was "to give significant, direct financial assistance to first-rate minority GOP candidates."

Since then, only $48,750 -- or 8.9 percent -- of the $547,000 the southwest Texas congressman has raised for his political action committee has gone to minority office-seekers while more than $100,000 has been routed to Republican Party organizations or causes, including a GOP redistricting effort in Texas, a legal defense fund for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) and Bonilla's reelection campaign. Most of the remainder of the money went to legal fees, fundraisers in Miami and other cities, airline tickets, hotels, catering services, consultants and salaries.

The piece is in tomorrow's Post.